For my artwork to be finished i need to animate it i have the frames ready but I don't have a program that can add PNG pictures in and animate them. If someone could mention a good program for 2D animation cheers

PNGs is not designed for storing animated pictures (If is's not true, correct me!). You should create a set of pictures and load it into memory as a textures array, the pictures format should be .BMP or Microsoft's format (.DDS) to reduce load time.

For my game I created my own class, which I called CCharacterPicture, which I used to load in the coordinates of the images I wanted to load. So, say if you had 4 pictures of you character in a file, I would load each of the 4 pictures into my class, specifying the images top and left coordinates, as well as it's height and width. Then I created States, which were just ordered sequences of the pictures. So for example, I could have one state walking, which would just be the pictures in the sequence [1, 2, 3, 4]. I also specified how long to wait before switching images so you can speed up or slow down the animation.

I'm not sure if DirectX or OpenGL provide anything like this. I know that DirectX has the ID3DXSprite, but I'm not sure if this is the same thing or not as I haven't used it at all yet.

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the pictures format should be .BMP or Microsoft's format (.DDS) to reduce load time.

Is this true that .bmp's will load faster than .png's? I'm using .png's for all of the pictures in my game, but I chose to do that because they are 10 - 50 times smaller than when I convert them to .bmp's. But if .bmp's will reduce load times, I might go with them. Can anyone confirm this?

Adobe Premiere? (There is a better adobe product, but I can't recall it's name)
Macromedia flash/director?
Paint.NET(for constucting frames) and bmp2avi(to join them)?
It all depends on your needs (and budget)...

I'm using png pictures for my animations in my game(since they are small and support a mask), animated by selecting the next image in the array. AFAIK gif is the only one that can be saved as a animated image. I think namingway meant load in images and move them around and possible size them.

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Is this true that .bmp's will load faster than .png's?

AFAIK, all compressed items take longer to load, since you have to uncompress them first. So I guess it isn't unlogical that BMPs load a a few milliseconds faster, however is it really worth it? Is a 10x times bigger download(or 10x more CD's) worth it?
I would say if your loading-times are horribly slow - go optimize somewhere else ;)

i ment the PNG's were the frames and eventually make them into a gif. Maybe I should do it like on RPG maker 2k - 2k3 and xp where you have sprite sheets and it animates them accordingly but I dont know how to do that yet...

Yeah, as far as I know there is no support for .gifs. If you want animation, you're going to have to code it yourself; or get someone elses code.

bog standard reply: I use gimp (check sig)

You might find it's totally not your cup of tea though :P
Just my preference ;]

imageforge, animationshop (by jasc.com ) and gypsee

Adobe After Effects will automagically take a set of numbered PNGs and turn it into an animation. On the whole After Effects is fairly nice for doing motion graphics animations.

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Original post by sirGustav Quote: Is this true that .bmp's will load faster than .png's? AFAIK, all compressed items take longer to load, since you have to uncompress them first. So I guess it isn't unlogical that BMPs load a a few milliseconds faster, however is it really worth it? Is a 10x times bigger download(or 10x more CD's) worth it? I would say if your loading-times are horribly slow - go optimize somewhere else ;)

The limiting factor of image loading will generally be the speed of the hard drive or other secondary storage. So a compressed image will often load faster than an uncompressed image since there is less to transfer from the hard drive to memory, even after you spend the time to uncompress it.